One of my friends purchased a home and wanted some electrical work done in the bathroom.  He had decided that he wanted a fixture installed on each side of the medicine cabinet.  In order to feed both fixtures it was necessary to remove the medicine cabinet from the wall.

Most medicine cabinets are fastened to a stud on one or both sides of the cabinet from the inside.  I could not find any screws, or other type of fasteners for that matter, anywhere on the inside of the cabinet.  I used some flat bladed screwdrivers, my fingernails and my fingers to wedge the medicine cabinet out of the wall and carefully placed it on the floor.

I noticed the end of a string, which had been behind the cabinet trim, adhering to the outside of the wall opening.  I tugged on it and there was weight behind it.  The string was telling me to pull on it.  I carefully reeled in the string like taking a fish out of a stream, and on the other end was an empty whiskey bottle.  Apparently the bottle had laid inside the wall so long that everything inside had evaporated.  I gave it to the home owner as a souvenir.

I guess one of the previous inhabitants had used the area below the medicine cabinet as a place to hold his liquor.

When I completed the wiring job, I fastened the medicine cabinet securely to the wall.

Another time I and another electrician were working on a three story house on the South Hill.  It was a very old house.  We were trying to fish wires over a dropped ceiling on the bottom floor.  The other electrician poked his head up through an opening in the ceiling.  He could see something shining across the room.  We finally got it out and discovered it was a sealed bottle of good whiskey.

The whiskey had to be 100 years old.  We turned it over to the home owner, who told us we would break it open when the remodel was finished.  I’m sure at the time no one realized the real value of the bottle or its contents.

I came to this conclusion when we finished the job and no one made any reference to the whiskey.

It makes you wonder how many items are tucked away in the nooks and crannies of buildings all over the world.

Very few electricians I have known would dig a ditch.  However, working alone, I had no choice but to do my own ditch digging.  My wife refused!

Here again you never know what kind of soil or what kinds of objects you might run into.  Sometimes I would arrange to hire someone to come dig the ditch.  Not always could you arrange for someone to come immediately.

On one job it was going to cost $100.00 to hire a man to set up his machine and he was busy at the time.  I told him to forget it.  I grabbed my shovel and started to dig.  It turned out that this time and place it was perfect digging!

No rocks, no roots, the soil was just moist enough, the dirt did not stick to the shovel, and yet it was easy to drive the point of the shovel into the earth.  A fifty foot ditch took me one hour without stopping to rest.  Very rarely have I been able to earn $100.00 in an hour.

Not all ditch digging is like that.  Near Creston, Washington, one ditch about 2 feet long was through broken lava.  I piled the broken lava in one pile, and the sand and soil in another pile.  Since I was using conduit, I threw the broken lava in first.  What a mistake!  I could not get all of it back in the ditch.  It left a ridge in the lawn.

The hardest ditch to dig was right alongside a mobile home and about 1 foot long.  There was no room for the shovel handle.  Eventually I learned to carry a short garden spade in my truck.

I remember another time the home owner offered to dig the ditch.  Usually when someone digs their own ditch, it is about 18 inches deep (too shallow) and crooked, as they wind their way over and around exposed rocks.  I would have to complete the ditch when I got to the job.

I agreed to let the home owner try.  When I got there he had dug a ditch 2 feet deep, 3 feet wide, perfectly squared and clean.  It was ready for me to use 3” conduit in the ditch.

Nice.

In fact, Artful!

All electrical wiring must provide a return path to the earth for the electrical current.  This is referred to as “grounding.”  The purpose of grounding, or the return path to earth, is to prevent flesh and bone from inadvertently providing that path.  (an uncomfortable and frequently fatal instance)  Until recently the most common way to provide that return path to the earth was the installation and use of ground rods.

Some jobs, where heavy metal beams were installed upright in concrete, allowed you to use the upright metal beams as a grounding means.  There are a few other options to the ground rod available, and of late the NEC encourages using a metal rod encased in a concrete foundation as a path to the earth.

A typical ground rod is 5/8” diameter and 8 feet long.  Knowing what is beneath the surface of the earth 8 feet down is not easy.  Usually you have no real idea.  The earth can be completely free of rocks, or it could be filled with small rocks, large rocks, boulders or other unknown objects installed and then forgotten.  Sometimes ground that is completely free of rocks can be compacted so much that it is as unforgiving as concrete.  In other cases, ground that is filled with rocks has been recently disturbed and provides an easy ground rod driving experience.

There are locations and situations where you are permitted to lay-in a ground rod in a ditch and bend one end of the rod up towards the surface.  There have been times when the ground was so rocky I have had to do that.  One time I was driving a ground rod, successfully, until it was about 7 feet in the ground.  Then I hit substantial subsurface basalt.  It would not allow the ground rod to go any further.  Since that time I have made it a practice to drive a ground rod at a 45 degree angle.

One location in the Spokane area, on a mountain side, had numerous ground rods sticking out of the ground all over the property.  They were all exposed about 5 feet out of the ground.  I guess they had a difficult time getting 8 feet of ground rod driven.

There have been a few times that I have tried to “save” an unused/unneeded ground rod by pulling it out of the ground.  One time I had a guy on a back-hoe pull one out for me.  When it came out it looked like a wet noodle.  It must have gone around 4 large rocks as it went down.  Since you can’t drive a bent ground rod, it would have been just as useful to abandon that one.

There was one instance where, to provide grounding, I had to run 50 feet of copper wire to a steel well casing.  The well casing had been in the ground for many years.  When I tested it I found that the grounding efficiency would not allow me to run a 100 watt bulb using the well casing as a ground.  However in that particular case I was grounding a transformer that used less than 100 watts, so I let it go.

When I first started driving ground rods, by hand, I used a sledge hammer.  Then I decided it was easier to use a steel fence post pounder.  Either way can be dangerous to the operator’s health.  One time when pounding a ground rod, one of the guys took such a big swing that the fence post pounder over balanced on the upward swing and came down on his head.  Another time the pounder came off the top of the ground rod, went a little to the side and on the downswing the guy’s hand got caught between the post and the pounder.  It ripped up his knuckles pretty good.

Lately we have made good use of powered impact drivers to drive ground rods.

We like that better.